


The Birth of Tragedy

by MissVictoriaRose



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Elena has a twin sister, F/M, Gen, Tagging as I go, story starts from season one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 21:20:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18213758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissVictoriaRose/pseuds/MissVictoriaRose
Summary: I pulled out an empty school note book and started copying the papers, attempting to keep the relevant information together. Looking down, there were three major words that kept repeating;DoppelgangerTombDamonI pushed the spiral away and grabbed my phone to google whatever the hell 'doppelganger’ meant. But before the search results could load I got a call.Hitting the green button, I asked, “Hey twin, did you miss me?”





	1. Show Me a Hero

There are moments in life that are cruel. Not for their context or the horrible things that happen within those moments, but for how unassumingly uninteresting they are. They exist, but you won’t recognize them until months, maybe even years, down the road when someone with overly professional politeness asks, “well, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me what happened.”

 

It’s only then that you discover this unnecessarily cruel moment. It’s then that you realize that there was nothing, no daunting background melody or some security pop-up asking if you “would like to continue,” that served as a proper warning. There is no notice that your world is about to change.

 

Things just carry on.

 

“Can’t you just suck it up?” I asked in a halfhearted plea. “We just got here.”

 

It was a party. It was  _ The party _ . I had barely touched drink in my hand, and the delicious Tyler Lockwood’s arm around my waist. I didn’t want to leave, much less drive to the other side of town to drop my twin off at home. God forbid, my parents might do something logical, like ask her why I wasn’t coming inside if I was dropping her off. Or worse, where I was going instead.

 

“Please,” Elena pleated. “I broke up with Matt, and I would really like to leave.”

 

I paused the red solo cup at my lips, before setting it down and giving Elena my full attention.

 

“What do you mean, you “broke up” with Matt?” I asked. 

 

Elena shrugged, glancing around. We were standing on the gazebo where the keg was set up. It was in the center of a natural clearing, with the thick woods on one side and the rushing river and its fall on the other. Most of the people in the gazebo with us were on the football team, and all of them were Matt’s closest friends.

 

They weren’t obvious about their eavesdropping, but I could feel Tyler’s arm tense around me as he carried on talking to a few of his guys. 

 

“Can’t you just call mom or something?” I begged. 

 

It wasn’t that I was careless, because I cared. I did. Elena is my best friend, had been since we each took our first breaths. We were the kind of twins that spoke in that baby language to each other that parents and old people always found adorable. She was my other half, sometimes by better half.

 

I cared that Elena and her boyfriend of five years had broken up.

 

But I also cared that Tyler was newly single and interested, and I had put a lot of work into the ‘I’m sleeping at a friend’s house’ scheme I was running with Caroline Forbes. 

 

Elena needed to go home and journal her feelings, then tomorrow, sober and in the daylight, I would give her the attention and sympathy that her crisis of the heart deserved. 

 

“We’ll spend all day tomorrow at the mall. You can tell me all about it while I talk you into a new haircut,” I smiled as Elena pulled out her phone.

 

She also rolled her eyes, but it’s my sisterly duty to ignore such rudeness.

 

“Will you wait with me?” Elena asked, holding the phone up to her ear.

 

I turned and whispered into Tyler’s ear, “Find me when you’re ready to get out of here. I’m going to get some fresh air.”

 

Elena turned away, still on the phone, and started walking towards the street. I followed, cursing her choice of footwear as she did. 

 

“You wore heels to a party in the woods, you deserve that,” Elena said as she hung up the phone. 

 

“They went with the outfit,” I explained for what had to be the tenth time tonight, “sneakers would have looked weird.”

 

We both looked down at Elena’s black converse, then at my black suede boots.

 

I opened my mouth, about to make a broader comment on her jeans and tank top combo, when someone else interrupted me.

 

“Katherine?” A throaty voice asked from behind them.

 

I turned around to face the stranger. His messy dark brown hair and pale skin contrasted with his icy blue eyes causing them to look haunting as they bounced from me to my sister and back. He looked cute with that confused burrow between his brows and unsure curl on his lips.

 

The leather jacket aesthetically tipped the scales from cute to hot.

 

“Who?” Elena asked, looking around us.

 

We were on the other side of the small patch of woods that separated the clearing from the road that leads back into town. There was no one else out here.

 

“I’m Veronica,” I said, then pointed to my twin, “and this is Elena.”

 

“Oh, you both just look…” his face did a weird thing twitch thing as several emotions flashed before he settled on a friendly mask with his eyes jumping between my sister and me, “I’m sorry. You both remind me of someone.” He licked his lips almost hesitantly, “I’m Damon.”

 

“Weird,” I mused, “I’ve only ever been mistaken for my twin. We’re identical, but there is definitely just the two of us.”

 

“And not to be rude or anything, Damon, but it’s kind of creepy you’re out here in the middle of nowhere,” Elena pointed out.

 

“You’re one to talk, you two are out here all by yourselves. Alone in the woods,” Damon joked. He had a smirk on his face as if inviting us into a private joke.

 

Elena scoffed, “It’s Mystic Falls, nothing bad ever happens here.”

 

“Other than that one time with the church and the soldiers, but that was like 150 years ago,” I attempted to joke, but the stranger didn’t laugh.

 

He just stared at us, like he was studying our faces.

 

“I got in a fight with my boyfriend,” Elena said, unable to handle the awkward silence that had settled around us.

 

“About what?” The stranger asked too quickly.

 

I raised an eyebrow and tilted my head, watching him watch us.

 

He held up his hands with a friendly smile. “May I ask?” 

 

“Life,” Elena shrugged, sharing a glance with me, “the future. He’s got it all mapped out.”

 

“You don’t want it?”

 

Elena shrugged again, helplessly at the topic of conversation, “I don’t know what I want.”

 

“Well,” his friendly smile slowly became a teasing smirk, “That’s not true.”

 

Elena looked halfway between insulted and confused.

 

I turned to look at him, with a matching teasing smirk on my lips, “And you know what she wants? Oh, mysterious stranger of whom has all the answers.”

 

His smirk grew, “You,” he turned to me, “and you want what everybody wants,” he explained. “Let’s just say I’ve been around a long time.” He looked us each up and down, then winked, “I’ve learned a few things.”

 

 “So Damon, tell me. What is it that I want,” Elena asked.

 

“You want a love that consumes you,” he said, stepping closer to Elena. “You want passion, and adventure, and even a little danger.”

 

“I’d rather have a challenge,” I said, drawing attention from my speechless sister, “I want a chase. I want danger. I want reckless and impulsive. I want a catch that feels so good it burns. Then I want something completely new.”

 

“And what do you want, Damon?”

 

He looked from me to my sister. His face twisted and he choked on a few words, before saying nothing.

 

A could be heard around the bend. We all turned to watch the grey lexis approach.

 

“It’s my parents,” Elena said, turning back to Damon.

 

I smiled and waved at Dad as he pulled up to the curb.

 

“I want you to get everything you’re looking for, but right now I want you to forget this happened,” Damon told Elena.

 

I turned, meeting his icy gaze in confusion, “And I want you to stay impulsive. Find something that makes you crazy and enjoy it for as long as you have it. And you’ll forget about this conversation.”

 

Then, a car honked and I spun around to see Dad in the driver's seat of mom’s lexis waiting at the curb for us.

 

“When did they get here?” Elena asked.

 

I turned to her, “You sure you want to leave?”

 

She nodded, opening the door to the back seat, “You sure you want to stay?”

 

“Caroline will be pissed if I ditch. We’ve been planning this for too long,” I smile at her.

 

She smiles back. Mom waves and Dad nods his head at me, mouthing an order to be good.

 

I wave back as the car turns around. I stay there watching as the red tail lights disappear around the bend to the bridge with a nagging thought that I should have gone with them.

 

Then my phone is ringing and Tyler’s asking me where I went and all thoughts of being anywhere else disappear. I found him back at the gazebo. Another keg had been tapped and empty while I had been waiting with Elena. 

 

“What took you so long?” He asked, pulling me closer to him.

 

“I don’t know,” I answered between kisses as he ran a hand up my thigh, “And you don’t really care.”

 

I stepped back, grabbing the hand that was on my thigh to pull him after me. I pulled him out of the gazebo, across the clearing, and up against a sturdy tree just past the tree line.

 

He looked like the cat that had caught the canary, “I’ve been thinking about you all night.”

 

He kissed me, all tongue and rushed pleasure. He moved to nibble at the muscle behind my jaw. I tilted my head, letting him kiss down my neck.

 

“Funny, I haven’t thought about you at all,” I said in a breathy voice. 

 

He chuckled, slipping his hands beneath my dress, “Oh, I doubt that.”

 

He got a finger in my panties and pulled them down my legs, letting them fall to the floor. Then, with a steady hand on each thigh, he pulled me up, scraping my back against the bark of the tree.

 

I dug my nails into the back of his neck as payback. My legs locked around his hips. He hissed and kissed me again roughly. He slid his hands up my ass to settle on my hips, grinding into me.

 

He hikes me up a little more to get his pants undone, and his zipper pulled down. His lips are back on my neck as my eyes open, settling on an unusual outline in the otherwise dark forest. 

 

It was human-shaped, and I could just make out the corner curve of a smile and ice blue eyes.

 

“Tyler,” I started to protest, to warn him about the creeper watching us.

 

But that was when the commotion in the clearing pulled his attention. 

 

People were freaking out about something, yelling out something.

 

“Cops,” Tyler interpreted for me, as he zips his pants back up, “the cops are here.”

 

“Why?” I asked, even though I know he doesn’t have an answer, “they never bother to break up this party.”

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we don’t want to be caught here.”

 

He offers out a hand and helps me back to the clearing. There are two officers already talking to party goers. The flashing lights of a police car parked by the street can be seen through the trees.

 

“What’s going on?” I asked, coming up to Caroline interrogating one of the officers. Her mother being the police chief allowed her certain liberties that I was not opposed to benefiting from.

 

“Something happened at the bridge,” Caroline answered, still fixed on the officer.

 

“Veronica Gilbert?” The officer asked.

 

All eyes turned to me.

 

“Yes,” I answered as Tyler whispered in my ear, “What’d you do?”

 

“We need you to come down to the station with us,” the officer said.

 

“Why do you need her? Aren’t you supposed to recite the Miranda rights first? My mom’s big on those. She’ll want a lawyer, and she’s invoking the right to stay silent,” Caroline said, before turning to me, “Don’t say anything, do you hear me? My mom loves to tell stories about people who would have gotten away if they had just stayed quiet. Don’t you dare become one of my mom’s stories.”

 

“There seems to be a misunderstanding,” the officer said, “she’s not under arrest. She’s just needed at the station. It’s in regards to her family.”   
  



	2. Mystery Attracts Mystery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I pulled out an empty school note book and started copying the papers, attempting to keep the relevant words together. Looking down, there were three major words that kept repeating;  
> Doppelganger  
> Tomb  
> Damon
> 
> I pushed the spiral away and grabbed my phone to google whatever the hell 'doppelganger’ meant. But before the search results could load I got a call.
> 
> Hitting the green button, I asked, “Hey twin, did you miss me?”

I waved Caroline and Tyler off, and got in the squad car with the officer. 

“What’s going on with my family?” I asked as the officer got in the driver's seat. He was young, compared to the rest of Sheriff Forbes’ deputies.

“Sheriff Forbes is waiting at the station for us. She’ll explain more when we get there,” he said.

“You don’t know anything?” I asked as the car pulled away from the party.

I watch how the red tail lights illuminated Caroline in the rearview mirror. She was on the phone with someone. Her hands rose to cover her mouth as she dropped her phone, then herself to the ground. I snap my head around to watch as Tyler picked her up off the floor. She was crying.

Caroline Forbes never cries, not even when her dad left. 

I turned to look at the man driving, “What’s going on?”

He shook his head and his knuckles turned white from his grip on the steering wheel. “It’s not my place to say. Sheriff Forbes will brief you when we get to the station.”

“I just want to know what I’m walking into. Am I in trouble? Can you at least tell me that much?”

He didn’t answer me, instead his attention stayed focus on the road ahead of us. His jaw was clenched and his shoulders were stiff. He was absolutely rigid. 

“Wow, that bad?” I tried to joke.

We came around the bend to the bridge to flashing red and blue lights.

The car slowed to a stop.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Ahead of us were police cars blocking off the bridge. 

“What happened?” I started to wrestle with the seatbelt, getting my legs under me so I could peer over the officer at the commotion.

He still didn’t answer.

One of the officers on the scene waved us through, motioning for one of the blocking squad cars to move. We started moving again, slowing rolling forward.

“Look away,” he said. His voice was gruff, rougher than it was earlier. I give him side-eye, but look out over the bridge into the darkness. “I mean it, kid.”

We got closer. His hand shot out towards my face, but I had grown up with two siblings. I ducked out of the way, putting the guardrail on the other side of the road right in my line of sight.

There are moments in life that are cruel. It happens in a split second when your brain finishes the story in front of you before you’re ready to know the ending. Like, you’re there in a classroom and your least favorite teacher is walking around collecting the homework you stayed up trying to finish, only for you to get that gut punch of remembering you never actually put your homework folder back in your school bag. Or, you hit send on a gossip filled text, only for you to register the contact name on the send line is the subject of the text and not your BFFL. 

Or, you see the destroyed guardrail on the bridge that just happens to be the only way back into town, and you know who had just driven down this road.

“Don’t,” the officer tried to warn me.

My eyes were glued to the scene, I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to. His hand was still up in the air, as if he could shield me from the horror by force of will alone. But it was too late.

“What-” my voice broke, “What happened?”

“The sheriff-”

“What happened?” I asked again.

“I’m really not trained to-”

Like someone had hit play on the tv, reality slammed back into me as the car traveled past the scene.

“What happened?” I growled, hitting the officer’s arm, “What happened? What happened? Where are they?”

“Easy!” The officer finally yelled as I caused the wheel to jerk.

He pushed me back into the passenger seat.

I stayed quiet, watching him as he looked back to the road. He ran a hand down his face.

“I’m not trained for this. I don’t know how-”

“Just tell me,” I said, barely above a whisper.

He sighed, then, with a quick glance at me, he answered, “Elena’s in the hospital, getting checked over. The car went over the bridge. She was found on the river bank. Alone.”

“My parents?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. The look full of pity he sent me said enough.

We got to the station. Sheriff Forbes needed me to confirm their identities.

“Due to the strict laws around this, I can’t be the one to do it,” She explained. 

I was directed to a poorly lit room that had one window. Through this window I could see two bodies, my parents’ bodies, laying on a large metal table.

“That’s them,” I told the people standing around the room. “That’s Miranda and Greyson Gilbert.”

“Jeremy is at the hospital,” Sheriff Forbes said, “I can give you a ride to meet him there. Your aunt Jenna and uncle John have already been contacted.”

I shook my head, “I would like to go home.”

She looked like she wanted to disagree, but relented. One of her deputies drove me to the house in another one of the squad cars.

“If you need anything, here is the Sherif’s personal number,” he said handing me a business card. 

I nodded, and got out of the car. 

The house was empty, understandably.

Everyone who wasn’t dead was at the hospital.

The stairs still creaked in the silence as I made my way to my room. 

There was only the sound of the wood drawer of my end table being yanked open. Then the sound of junk hitting junk as I dug around for an old prescription bottle.

Then it was quiet again. Soundless as I poured out a handful of pills and shoved them all in my mouth at once. 

I coughed struggling to force all the pills down.

Then a second handful. 

I crawled into bed still wearing my clothes from the party.

The stupid pointless ridiculous party I had been so happy about just an hour and a half ago.

If I wasn’t so stupid, so unbelievably selfish, there would be the noise of my family in this house. 

But there was nothing.

And then I was nothing.

But life has never been that convenient or polite, as far as I’ve been concerned. It wasn’t graceful, nor was it particularly gentle waking up. One moment I was asleep. The next moment I was sitting in a hospital bed with a sheet of paper sticking to my forehead.

Yanking it off, I noticed that there was a desk, the kind that rolls, in front of me covered with white papers. I looked back at the one in my hand. The first line read,

Smile, be kind, be friendly, and don’t say a goddamn thing out of the ordinary.

It was underlined and written over multiple times like someone was trying to make a point. But the most bizarre part, was that it had been written in my own handwriting. The cursive ‘e’ connecting the letters next to it and the arch of the ‘a’ like it had been printed, along with the larger than average lettering – it was undeniably my own handwriting.

My handwriting down the page read;

Season 1, episode 1

There was a question mark next to it. Then a drawn arrow to the next sentence, but that was crossed out;

Comet festival? Night of the Comet?

The line under it was circled;

First day of junior year is episode one. 

Then there was a list of words;

Salvatores  
Vicky  
Vampires  
Crystal  
Tomb  
Doppelgangers

The last two lines on the page read;

Don’t trust Damon  
Save Elena – ?

I stared at the last line longer than I needed to try to figure out what the question mark could mean. It wasn’t a question. Save Elena? Yes. Always yes. Without hesitation, if needed, yes. Maybe that’s what it meant, that she might not be in danger. But who the hell was Damon?

The door opened, I shoved the papers into a pile as a nurse walked in. She smiled reassuringly at me.

“You’re aunt is here to pick you up.”

“Uh,” I hesitated, not knowing what to say as I scanned the rest of the room. 

“I know, it’s going to be a change leaving here. But Dr. Fell and Jenna both think you’re ready. You’ve got your bag packed,” at this the pulled a duffle bag out of the closet in the far corner of the sparse room, “and your first out-patient appointment is in one week.”

I nodded, and smiled at her. She came closer and helped me out of bed. It was only then that I realized that I was wearing some sort of medical scrubs. 

“I’ll leave you to change, just open the door when you’re ready and I’ll walk you out to meet your aunt,” she said as she left.

I looked down at the duffle bag she had pulled out. 

I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know why I needed to be retrieved from the hospital with clearly no injuries.

I didn’t remember writing the papers.

I opened the duffle and pulled out a pair of jeans and an old grey Duran Duran shirt that had belonged to my father. I quickly changed, leaving the scrubs on the bed and taking the papers. Then opened the door to smile at the nurse.

She smiled back and started walking down the hall.

“Now remember, if there is anything you need to talk about, you can always call.”

“Thanks.”

“And if things get too stressful, you can always check yourself back in for a weekend,” she smiled back at me. 

I smiled back, avidly attempting not to think hard on what the nurse was implying. Jenna was waiting for us in the lobby. I hadn’t seen her since two years ago at her graduation for getting her masters in something. She looked good, abet stressed.

I smiled, and she smiled back as she stood up and held her arms out. I sped up my pace to hug her. 

“Ready to get out of her?” She asked quietly. Over her shoulder was a ‘Happening this Week’ poster that read Week of September 9, 2009. 

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I said.

“I just need a few signatures, then you’re ready to go,” the nurse interrupted.

Jenna grabbed the offered pen and flipped a few pages to sign on a few dotted lines.

“Elena and Jeremy really missed you,” Jenna said absentmindedly. “They’ll be excited to see you again. There at school right now, but they’ll be home in a few hours. If you feel up to it I know they both have plans to go to the Night of the Comet festival happening tonight.”

I hummed, unwilling to commit to any plans at the moment.

The nurse nodded that Jenna had signed it all, and then walked away. Jenna led me outside to her car. The whole thing felt anticlimactic for getting out of a building with the name Arkham Psychiatric Center. 

Once it got out of view I turned to Jenna, “Are we okay?”

She looked at me, then back at the road.

“They told me I shouldn’t ask this, but are you okay? Because we’ll be okay. We’ll always be okay, as long as you talk to me honestly.”

“I’m okay,” if you discount the papers and lack of memory for the last four months, “And I’m going to be okay. I promise to tell you if I start to slip, but I would really like to put it all behind me.”

She nodded, but still looked strained. 

“Do you want me to take you home, or…”

“Home, please. I miss my room.”

She laughed, slipping more into the friend role that I had grown to know her as.

“How is everyone else?” I asked.

“Well, Elena has a new boyfriend who is nothing like Matt.”

“Really? How did that happen?”

“They met the first day of school, and his name is Stefan Salvatore,” she sang the last part.

I laughed, before remembering that Salvatore was one of the words on the list. Jenna gave me a funny look for my cut-off laugh.

“What else have I missed?”

“Jermey has enter the teenage-rebellion phase. I can’t tell if it a phase of if it’s something I should be worried about…”

“Well, we’re all entitled to our own stupidity,” I tried to say neutrally, because clearly I’ve missed quite a lot.

“He’s skipped 6 classes in the last two days. I was called up to meet with his history teacher today.”

“Ouch. Is it still Mr. Tanner?”

“Yep, and he was highly unimpressed with the ‘kid sister’ raising a couple of teenagers.”

“Oh fuck him, what does he know? Forgotten facts about dead people? Please, his job could be replaced with an internet enabled television and youtube.”

That got a big laugh out of her, “Of I’ve missed you!” She said as we pulled into the driveway.

I got out of the car and made a b-line to my room. Everything was just as I left it. Including my dead phone laying under my pillow. I plugged it into the charger. While waiting for it to turn on I pulled out the papers and spread them across my bed. Every page had words scribbled and scratched out. There were lines connecting things and several things aggressively circled.

I pulled out an empty school note book and started copying the papers, attempting to keep the relevant words together. Looking down, there were three major words that kept repeating;  
Doppelganger  
Tomb  
Damon

I pushed the spiral away and grabbed my phone to google whatever the hell 'doppelganger’ meant. But before the search results could load I got a call.

Hitting the green button, I asked, “Hey twin, did you miss me?”

“Caroline has enlisted Bonnie and I to handout pamphlets for the festival tonight, want to join?”


End file.
